Twitter purges accounts, and conservatives cry foul

Twitter said: “As part of our ongoing work in safety, we identify suspicious account behaviors that indicate automated activity or violations of our policies around having multiple accounts, or abuse.” | Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images

Twitter has pruned more suspected trolls and fake accounts from its platform, prompting several of its most outspoken conservative users to complain Wednesday that they had lost thousands of followers overnight.

Conservatives quickly decried what they called the "#twitterlockout," adding it to their list of grievances against what they see as an ideologically liberal tech industry. The topic also got heavy promotion among Twitter accounts that some researchers have linked to Russia's online influence campaigns.

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Twitter's move came just days after the federal indictments of 13 Russians connected with a St. Petersburg-based "troll farm" heightened the pressure on social media companies to clamp down on the plague of fake accounts that marred the 2016 presidential election.

Twitter said Wednesday that it was simply cleansing its platform of objectively “spammy behavior,” an effort it had announced late last year. “As part of our ongoing work in safety, we identify suspicious account behaviors that indicate automated activity or violations of our policies around having multiple accounts, or abuse,” a spokesperson told POLITICO.

Users complaining about the move included political provocateur James O’Keefe, who's best known for exploits like trying and failing to get The Washington Post to publish fake sexual abuse allegations against former Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. His group Project Veritas also released a compilation video last month that it claimed showed Twitter employees, filmed without their awareness, admitting to silencing conservative voices.

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“Looks like thousands of Twitter users committed the thought crime of tweeting about ‘God,’ ‘the American flag,’ and ‘guns,’ and were taken off the platform,” O’Keefe tweeted Wednesday.

According to data pulled from the social analytics tool CrowdTangle, O’Keefe lost about 2,400 followers between Tuesday and Wednesday, a drop of just more than half a percent after weeks of constant growth. That still left him with about 385,500 followers — and by early Wednesday evening, he had regained all his losses.

Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent who appears as a frequent commentator on Fox News and elsewhere, tweeted a similar complaint: "@Twitter is discriminating against conservative voices & banned me,& many others,from posting ads while wiping out 1000s of followers.”

"I’d give them benefit of doubt but they’ve been caught too many times censoring conservative accounts #TwitterLockOut," tweetedFlynn, whose follower count in the CrowdTangle analysis had dropped a little more than 2 percent overnight.

The Twitter spokesperson said the company's tools are “apolitical” and the platform's rules are enforced “without political bias.” The person added that with problematic accounts, the company takes steps to determine whether “a human is behind it,” such as by attempting to verify a valid phone number.

“That’s why some people may be experiencing suspensions or locks. This is part of our ongoing, comprehensive efforts to make Twitter safer and healthier for everyone,” said the spokesperson.

At least one group of experts sees Russian help in making the "#twitterlockout" hashtag go viral.

The "Hamilton 68" website, created by the organization Alliance for Securing Democracy and affiliated with the German Marshall Fund of the United States, listed "twitterlockout" Wednesday afternoon as the most-used and fastest-spreading hashtag "promoted by Russia-linked influence networks on Twitter" during the past 48 hours.

That network includes Twitter accounts "likely controlled by Russian government influence operation," those that "amplify themes promoted by Russian government media" and "users who have been influenced by the first two groups," the alliance says in its explanation of its methodology.

The skirmish is yet another example of the blowback that Twitter and other social media companies have taken since the 2016 election, especially after congressional investigators and special counsel Robert Mueller's office laid out the details of how they say Russian forces leveraged the companies' platforms to meddle in American politics.

In December, Twitter announced that it would begin taking steps to more aggressively enforce its rules against “hateful conduct and abusive behavior.” That provoked the first objections from some on the right who called the steps a "#twitterpurge."

The company conceded at the time that “we may make some mistakes and are working on a robust appeals process.”

Conservatives have escalated their criticisms of Twitter and other social media companies in recent months, accusing them of wielding the power granted by their enormous user bases to silence conservative voices. Liberals, meanwhile, have accused Twitter of allowing fake and abusive accounts to fester in order to maintain a high user count, an important stat for investors.

Twitter does not disclose precisely how many users it has, but analysts looking at company information have estimated the number at around 330 million active users a month.